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Sublime

Concept
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A feeling of awe, vastness, and overwhelming greatness, often evoked by nature or a spiritual experience

Explore this topic in depth (2)

Romanticism — Romanticism was not simply a love of nature or strong feeling. It was a varied poetic response to revolution, industrial change, scientific thought and new questions about the individual mind, freedom and humanity’s place in the world.

Nature Poetry — Nature poetry is not simply poetry with scenery in it. Across centuries and cultures, poets have used birds, weather, gardens, oceans, seasons and stars to test what it means to be human—and to meet a world that may not be human-centred at all.

Detailed Definition
Sublime in poetry denotes an aesthetic and philosophical mode that evokes awe, terror, and transcendent wonder in the face of vastness, power, or incomprehensibility—whether in nature, the divine, or the infinite—and is characterized by elevated diction, hyperbolic imagery, and emotional extremity; rooted in Longinus and refined by Romantic thinkers like Burke and Kant, the sublime moves beyond beauty to confront the limits of human perception and language, as in Wordsworth’s mountains or Dickinson’s abysses, where the poem becomes a threshold between the knowable and the overwhelming, affirming the mind’s capacity to grapple with its own finitude.
Example
Example in poetry:
Sublime|Awe-inspiring elevation beyond beauty; Burke's terror mixed with grandeur; Wordsworth's overwhelming natural power; Transcendent aesthetic experience
Additional Notes
Sublime in poetry refers to grandeur that inspires awe, often through vastness, beauty, or terror, as described in Romantic aesthetics.
Other Meanings of “Sublime”
Also Known As
Elevated Grand Transcendent Lofty
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